Summary

In this chapter, we discovered how Groovy is different from Java, and how Groovy is used in Gradle. We saw how to create our own tasks and how to hook into the Android plugin, giving us a lot of power to manipulate the build process or dynamically add our own tasks.

In the last part of the chapter, we looked at creating plugins and ensured that we can reuse them in several projects by creating a standalone plugin. There is much more to learn about plugins, but unfortunately, we cannot cover it all in this book. Luckily, the Gradle user guide has a thorough description of all the possibilities at https://gradle.org/docs/current/userguide/custom_plugins.html.

In the next chapter, we will talk about the importance of continuous integration (CI). With a good CI system in place, we can build, test, and deploy apps and libraries with one click. Continuous integration is thus an important part of build automation in general.